Quark XPress
Description
Quark XPress is widely-used electronic publishing software. It provides the tools required to create, design, and deliver high-impact publications in both print and electronic media. It offers a suite of publishing features for:
- Layout and design
- Printing and output
- Text processing
- Colour management
- Web page design
Strengths
- Stable
- Logical in its presentation
- Good for long documents such as books
- Building an index is easier in the latest version
- You can lock your chapters or books to become read only
- Quark lets you open documents as different books and work with them as separate files
- Good at managing colours for output
- Sophisticated typography controls, precise layout functions, and built-in drawing tools
- Offers support for layers, tables, Web documents, and XML data
- It has had very few upgrades in its life
- Exported Web documents conform to open standards and can be opened and edited in standard web tools
- If you want to move a print document to a web document, it is only a matter of some cut and paste and a few slight adjustments.
Weaknesses
- A serious drawback is that QuarkXPress treats Web and print documents as mutually exclusive workflows
- Its XML functions are difficult to learn
- Beginning to show its age. E.g. the single Undo level is archaic
- Its type composition engine still gives you exact control over tracking and kerning, but it's not as sophisticated as others
- It cannot directly generate PDF files or import native Photoshop files
- The scattered XML functions are data extraction tools and not WYSIWYG
- It cannot access the specialised glyphs (such as ligatures or true fractions) offered by OpenType fonts
- Its interface is reported to be not as user-friendly as other tools.